


hold me

by Ealasaid



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Canon Divergent, Character Study, Civilians in war, F/M, Missing Scene, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sex, implied infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 12:01:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22709020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ealasaid/pseuds/Ealasaid
Summary: For a moment, the war is of secondary importance.
Relationships: Lauri/William Schofield
Comments: 11
Kudos: 30





	hold me

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [embrasse moi](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22383103) by [mothmaiden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothmaiden/pseuds/mothmaiden). 

> This started as a technical exercise to write the female perspective of protectresses's work, which was the first delicious work of this pairing in this fandom posted here on AO3. Then, it morphed into something else after my second and third viewings. May the thirst LIVE ON.

Sharp noises -- crackles and pops, like a low-burning fire; but no fire popped thrice in such precise succession. The soldiers were shooting, and that woke her up faster than anything else.

Soldiers shooting meant a hunt was on. Lauri remembered the hunt back when she lived in Queant with her mother and father, and the nobles who would ride through the forest on their powerful horses with their fine hunting horns and their packs of hunting dogs. No horns sounded now, but the barking of the rifles was enough warning for prey to hide.

She got up. She could feel in her bones that it would not be that long until the sun would rise and the day would start. (Though she had lived underground for months, now, and it was not always easy to sense the passage of time when she could not reliably see the sun -- still, a sense pervaded --) Her little one would wake, soon.

She shuffled behind the beautiful screen she’d stood in the corner. She had scavenged it from the household of M. Brodeur weeks ago, when the family had at last departed. It was amazingly carved into cunning birds and sweet butterflies, and she could still feel the luscious smoothness of the wood when she thought of how she found it, carefully picking her way through the ruins of Écoust-Saint-Mein (in the bitterness of late winter winds whilst searching for something -- anything -- to eat). The brightness of the wood-grain, gleaming in the cold sunlight, had caught her eye. The remembrance of better times convinced her to carry it back to her hidden home.

She traced its loops and whorls lightly, thinking back on that time. The ritual was mesmerizing. It never failed to give her a sense of peace. Her breathing slowed as she closed her eyes, matching the slow, rippling glow of her banked coals as she mapped the curlicues with her fingertips.

\-- the splintering of breaking wood -- something banged, loudly, startling her badly. She froze where she was. Distantly, outside, she heard footsteps running past her hiding place. 

He appeared like a phantasm, an apparition. For a frightening moment she watched him watch her room through a gun’s sights, and clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle the movement of her breath and keep the violation she felt from crawling out her throat. The Allemand had been content to stay above ground so far, since they moved into Écoust, and she could not fathom the reason they would encroach on her last avenue of providence.

Nor could she convince herself to move as he completed his sweep. Her feet were frozen to the ground as she traded looks with the long barrel of his rifle. 

“There is nothing here for you,” she managed, forcing her hands away from her mouth through sheer terror. She held them up instead, trembling. “Please, there is nothing here for you. Please.”

He appeared to pause, then lowered his weapon as he answered. She could not seem to hear it right at first, but she caught a bit -- “Anglais” --

She breathed out. Anglais soldiers were not nearly as terrifying as Allemand. And he was not pointing that gun at her anymore. 

“Is this Écoust?” he asked. She parsed its meaning, somehow. 

“Yes,” she replied. “Where are the others?”

There were no others. He was alone. And he needed to be somewhere -- “les arbres” he said, frustrated. “Croissit?” 

“Ah, Croisilles!” If it was not for the Allemande in the street and her heart still pounding hard enough to make her shake, she could almost believe he was asking directions on Rue Marceau Dupuis. “There is a river --” she repeated the strange syllables in his language to make sure he understood “-- it flows south. Follow it to Croisilles.”

He repeated this. She nodded; he nodded in reply. But, she noticed, the action pained him. He winced and raised a hand to touch at the back of his head, seeming surprised. She heard his gasp as he swayed, and nearly fell in faint.

“Sit,” she said, alarmed, and repeated herself, more a demand than a proper invitation. She could see clearly now that the man was half-dead, held upright more by raw determination than anything else as he staggered under the weight of his gear. Another dead soldier would do no one any good. 

He sat heavily. Half-dead or not, tension thrummed through every seam of his uniform. It would not do to startle him, Lauri thought, keeping still, and waited a moment, letting him settle. It was only when she heard him breathe deeply through his nose that she reached out, gently feeling for the wound. 

He stiffened when she touched him. “Shh,” she murmured, now intrigued; she used to have some skill patching up the minor scrapes and pains of young cousins, made sharper with the advent of conflict, but she had not had an occasion to tend to a combatant for over a year. He let her push his head into a position where the light from her small fire could illuminate the back of his head. 

She felt the slight drag of skin-on-skin as her palms pressed his cheek, the sensation rippling through her awareness with an intensity that recalled when -- (It was the first time in months she had touched another mature person -- a man -- with tenderness. It was so different from scrabbling at survival, pitting herself against the others, fearing nothing more than being touched --) 

She pushed such thoughts to the back of her mind. In the light, she could confirm what her fingers felt: his hair was soaked through with blood below the crown. He shied hard when her fingertips found a raised ridge, tacky with blood and dirt. “Shh,” she soothed, distantly. (The immediacy of his invasion was fading rapidly in the face of tending to his pain. It wasn’t wise to dwell.) It could not be serious, she surmised, feeling out the contours of the wound, or he would not have been able to walk anywhere, but it could still be problematic. She withdrew.

She felt a strange connection to this man. For whatever reason, he was here, now, and brought with him a challenge she could meet. She could ease his suffering, at least a little. She was happy to help.

Lightness of heart made it easy work to bear. And... 

She could not help but notice as his mouth parted with surprise when she replaced her hands with a dampened cloth, gently loosing the blood and grime from his scalp. His lashes glittered rose-gold in the firelight as they swept closed and he relaxed into her touch -- first, slow, and then with sudden bonelessness, in a way that affected her more than she dreamed possible. The soft moan that limned his lips in burning light was certainly involuntary. And, for a moment (his rifle propped within reach and the evidence of how hard he had fought to live staining his uniform), le Anglais was vulnerable in his pliability beneath her fingers. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat.

Then his eyes opened with new awareness; even in dim light, they found hers. (Caught, and held.) They were extraordinarily dark. 

“Thank you,” he said. 

This was then when her little one chose to wake properly, her soft hiccoughing cry heralding her waking. Lauri could not hold back her instinctive jolt towards the sound, but managed to wait until the soldier courteously took over holding the rag to his head before she got up to greet her baby.

“My little one,” she said, feeling oddly flustered, apologizing and introducing both at once as she lifted the baby out of the makeshift cradle. Shyly, even. 

Her baby was lovely, dark curls and eyes exactly as though she was really Lauri’s. Lauri had found her in the ruins but a month past. She could do nothing but speculate on the child’s origins, for everyone with sense had long fled Écoust, but this baby needed her in the same way her own baby would have needed her. It was enough, in these times. 

She looked at him and saw he was looking at her little one. The shock lit up his face like the sun. She’d seen that look on others, before; she’d seen it on herself, in half-formed reflections in shattered windows. He had children of his own, somewhere.

It hits her hard and fast. Jealousy is a vicious thing, Lauri realizes. (It is absolutely bewildering that she should realize this now; he is the first person not trying to take something from her in months, how can this cause  _ jealousy _ \-- ) She can feel it curl in her stomach and sink its fangs deep into her heart, pumping poison to choke her throat and set fire to her skin as thoughts spiral into anxious anger. He is here, now, with her -- he is as found by Lauri as her baby was, even if he did come into her basement under his own power. She has put her hands on him and that makes him hers, in this world where everything you cannot keep your hands on is stolen from you. She deserves him, more than whomever bore his --

He stumbles over to the mattress she kneels on and greets her baby, gently. “Bonjour,” he says, half sing-song, holding out a finger for her baby to hold. “Bonjour, little one.”

“Do you have children?” she asks, feeling her jealousy melt beneath the delight of new parents meeting similarly-ecstatic parents everywhere. She tries it again, in English. “Child . . . ren?”

He doesn’t answer her; he is entranced by her baby. Lauri can hardly believe the heady mix of covetousness and pride she feels as he softly recites something rhythmic at her insistence, quieting her little one. She chastises herself more, when he pulls out canned meat and tinned vegetables and wedges of cheese and crackers wrapped in waxed paper and heaps it on the mattress and the floor. His words fall over themselves in urgency, but it is easy to tell he wants her to have it for her little one.

“She can’t eat this,” Lauri says. She tries to say it softly; she does not want to disappoint him. She felt a start of hope when he began to produce food, but finding milk is impossible these days, and no soldier would have some on hand, anyway. They need things that can keep. “She needs milk.”

He goes still. His French is as poor as her English, but her words have meaning for him. Then his hands move with uncanny precision as he unclasps a canteen from his gear and twists the top free. He holds it out for her to smell.

It’s milk.

A delicious smoothness seems to insulate her from the world. Nothing at that moment is more real than the warm weight in her arms, the scent of cream and fat in the air, and his eyes meeting hers over a battered canteen. She breathes out.

Dreamlike, she takes the open container and sets it gently by the dresser so it will not get inadvertently knocked over. He watches unblinkingly, appearing just as frozen as she is, as she gently lays her little one down at the foot of the mattress. Then, gently, she reaches out to feel the faint stubble along his jaw and brush her thumb over his wide mouth. She leans forward and kisses him. “Stay,” she whispers against his mouth.

He is still frozen when she grasps at his hand and pulls it forward to hold her. It is when he touches her body that whatever restraint he had disappears -- he kisses her back, voraciously, reaching for her with his other hand as she deftly maneuvers his gear off his shoulders. 

She knew on some level that it could not be what she recalled from before the war. That time was far, far more light-hearted and far, far less desperate, with a boy who died in the first few months of fighting and did not live to learn what survival truly meant. She could not even muster the energy to mourn that loss, anymore.

In this moment, this soldier is exactly what she wants. She pulls him in willingly once he is free of his pack, shifting so her weight is on her heels and he can pin her awkwardly half-on, half-off the mattress. He is strong and hard beneath the layers of his uniform, she discovers, and he shakes deliciously when he rucks up her apron and her skirts to slide between her thighs and into her body. The rough shock of his first thrust has her gasping in tandem with his groan, muffled in her breast as he curls in on himself and shudders. 

She tilts her hips and meets the next one with a ferocity that startles herself. Even with his face tucked into her neck, she can see the flutter of his eyelashes like when he relaxed under her ministrations earlier. She can taste his lips parting as he pants his warm breath across her clavicles. And she can feel him, moving deeper and deeper, especially as she wraps her legs around his waist, curls her hands around the dresser’s legs above her head, and begs him to move faster, faster, in French and English and who knows what. 

He makes a noise that cannot appear to decide if it is a snarl or a sob, plants one hand on the ground beside her head, and rears up to throw himself into it with the new leverage. The dresser knocks against the basement wall from the force of it, but it is the sight of his face, his gaze fixed on her, that causes her at last to arch and cry out, completely losing herself in fiery starbursts behind her eyelids.

This undoes him. He buries himself in her with an awful quiet, eyes closing and mouth clamping shut to stifle his grunt.

They lie together afterward, the chill of the floor a comfort after the heat of their coupling. Her daughter burbles softly, entertaining herself with the strange shapes of packaged food as Lauri and her soldier listen to their breathing normalize. A bell tolls in the distance, unearthly in how its ringing tones manage to carry from beyond Écoust’s abandoned boundaries. His lips brush her skin after a moment, a pleasant sensation.

He sits up abruptly as the bell tolls six. She looks up at him curiously; his eyes have gone distant. Without a word he shrugs back into his gear and staggers upright, securing his uniform. 

“Stay,” she says, blinking as his movements become more frenzied. She sits up in alarm. “You can’t go now. The soldiers are waking, they are everywhere--!” 

“I must go,” he says, bleakly. His is the face of one walking forward into death, and it might have meant more to her, once. 

“Please, stay,” she says. Begs, because she does not want to have to return to face the reality of Écoust, yet. “Please!” 

She can see it tears at him, leaving her behind. Leaving her daughter behind. But -- “I’m sorry,” he says. He shakes his head and is gone, the sound of his footsteps already fading. 

“Thank you,” Lauri whispers to the air. She breathes, then goes to warm the milk.

**Author's Note:**

> RIP my life. I just want to kick the army command until Lance Corporal Schofield gets to go home to his wife and children ALIVE, forever and ever, amen.


End file.
